15 years in 3D: NVIDIA cofounder Chris Malachowsky speaks

At NVIDIA's recent NVISION conference, I chatted with company cofounder Chris …

Like Epcot Center, but with more "teh future"

Hot on the heels of the Intel Developer Forum, NVIDIA debuted its own, brand new conference: NVISION. Pitched as an "visual computing ecosystem" conference, the point of NVISION wasn't for NVIDIA or any its "ecosystem" partners to announce products; rather, the point was to showcase the state-of-the-art in visual computing. And showcase it they did.

This conference format made for some truly eye-popping demos, many of which I was quite glad to see in person for the first time. But the lack of specific product announcements, when coupled with the fact that everything that was on display had been previously unveiled (often at SIGGRAPH earlier in the month), made the conference very hard to report on. In short, trying to report on NVISION was a bit like trying to report on a trip to Disney's Epcot Center, in that "I saw some really cool stuff" is only a news article if you were the first person to see that stuff; otherwise, it's just a fun few days. In the case of everything from Microsoft's Photosynth to a 3D online social network from a Korean company called Nurien, I definitely was not among the first to see any of it, but it was still remarkably cool.

Even though I have my doubts about the conference's actual news value, I'm still glad I went, and I think that some of the hate for the event that I've seen on the hardware boards has been unjustified. NVIDIA has been in the GPU business for 15 years this year, and it has been a phenomenal ride. The company has gone from a niche player in a market that was a niche (3D) of a niche (PC graphics), to a major force in computing, so they're entitled to throw themselves a 15th birthday party, even if it is in the guise of an "ecosystem conference."

But watching NVIDIA blow out the candles on the cake was actually the least important thing that I got out of the conference. The most important was a pair of interviews: one retrospective chat with NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky, and one extremely forward-looking talk with Epic Games' co-founder and father of the widely licensed Unreal engine family, Tim Sweeney.

Both of these interviews, when taken together, lead me to believe strongly that NVIDIA's future is in mobile 3D, and that the company's prospects for continued discrete graphics dominance are considerably more murky than many may realize. Indeed, the discrete GPU itself, along the popular graphics APIs that it spawned, is about to become an anachronism, at least for the upcoming turn in Sutherland's Wheel of Reincarnation. Just how well NVIDIA will adapt to this next turn of the wheel remains to be seen... but that's a topic for later.

Before I drift too far into the future, let's talk about the past. Reproduced below is an edited version of a roughly 30-minute chat with Malachowsky, in which we talk about inflection points, "wow!" moments, the way things were, and the road ahead. (After reading this interview, stay tuned for my chat with Tim Sweeney to be published next week.)

Back in the day

JS: I started covering the hardware scene in 1998, with 3Dfx and GLQuake and all that, so things have changed for you guys since that time. You guys have gone from being a small fish in this niche market—people were like, "3D accelerator, what is that?"—to being at the center of a major phenomenon in computing. So I wanted to get a sense from you, as cofounder, of how that feels. Do you guys feel all grown up now?

CM: When we came out with our first product, which was released with Windows 95, and right after it came out, our customer, which was Diamond Multimedia, came over to NVIDIA and threw us a party and there was cake and all that, and at that time on their radar there were 35 companies trying to do 3D graphics for the PC, and today there are two of us.

And of those 35, ATI was probably one of them, Matrox might have been one of them, but there's really nobody else around. Everyone else either died or was consumed.

That first product of ours—I basically designed the entire graphics pipeline myself—where it was a good technical achievement, it was a really shitty product. And when we shipped it, and we shipped some time around November, I think we sold a quarter million of them in two or three months and then almost nothing—it went down to a dribble. Because there really was no market for 3D graphics in the consumer space, despite EETimes and every industry rag trying to create this big onslaught of stuff.

And I remember, between us and our partner—we partnered with SGS Thompson, a large European semiconductor company—we probably spent $15 million developing this first product: writing the software, developing the tool set, hiring people, and to ship a non-product into a non-market. And to think about 35 other companies, flushing a similar amount of money down the drain, there was about half a billion dollars being spent to keep us from succeeding in a non-market. So that's kind of the auspicious beginning.

I credit 3Dfx, because I think they legitimized 3D graphics for consumers—that there really was a market, and that it was a compelling enough jump in performance levels that the game guys who were focused on VGA as the least common denominator—the Wolfenstein and Doom franchises were growing—they targeted that low common denominator. But I think 3Dfx, to their credit, jumped it enough to where they said, "we can't ignore this at this price-point."

So we stepped up to compete in a market where the competition built a more special-purpose, graphics-only thing, but we competed with a more integrated, single-chip device, and it turned out to be a good call. And while we were competing—and I can say this because we ended up joining forces—they [3Dfx] had smart people, understood the same algorithms, used the same tools, used the same processes, had access to the same manufacturers, but we just optimized different things.

It was really interesting when we got the two engineering teams together. It ended up giving us the intellectual and human capital horsepower to really start driving the platform, and I think that helped us grow the market to what you see now. It evolved from a fixed-function device to a highly programmable unified architecture.

Did we see it coming, that it would be as large a market and influential enough to host a conference like this? No. Did we believe it could? Yes, but we didn't give ourselves the liberty of looking too far ahead.